Great theme. I’m pretty happy with it already. I have a couple of issues which I’ll address in separate threads. The first is that on my blog at http://www.vagobond.com I notice that only one small story is showing. Can you tell me why that is and how I can fix it so both small stories show?

First you should really remove these *&$%^#( annoying kontera ads with double underlines. Nothing pisses people of more than these. Why you would want to subject your readers to this and piss them off is something I never understood.

As far as posts not showing on your homepage it is because you did not assign them to be in the homepage category or you simply put them in a category that you excluded from the homepage. Check your ‘Mainpage’ options tab, the answer is in there and inside the posts not showing not being tagged or assigned properly.

Actually, that’s not the problem. I’ve left the assignment open so all categories should show. As to Kontera, you’re right about that. I’ve disabled the plugin. And just so we’re clear…I think you’re a jerk.

Well I may be a jerk but I am still trying to help you. I believe I explained to you why the posts were not showing on your page. In the Mainpage Options in the admin section there is a section at the bottom of that tab where you can select to exclude categories from appearing on your homepage. Make sure you did not assign your posts for example to Uncategorized and have these posts not showing be part of the ‘uncategorized’ category.

Have you also tried to disable all plug ins and see if the same issue happens? If not I can t see what else could cause post to not show. I just looked at your page and it seems now that you have more than 2 pages and more posts are showing. Does that mean you managed to find the problem?

Okay, so MAYBE you aren’t a jerk after all. I think I wasn’t being clear about what the issue is. On the page there’s the slider, then below that are three large stories, below that, I think there are supposed to be two small stories side by side, but I’ve only got one and it throws the balance of the page off (IMHO). The live-demo has four stories showing.

I don’t think it is a mainpage menu problem. I have selected: crossfade slider and I’ve not excluded any categories.

I’ll see if it is a plugin that is throwing things…nope, just deactivated and activated one by one. I’m stumped.

Okay, this is strange to me, but I had 3 large stories selected to show. I think it must have a default 4 story maximum. When I put it at 2 large, the 2 small appear. 4 large, all the smalls are fine. I’m going to call this resolved.

This is Jonathan from Kontera. While I understand that some users like Monsoon might not care for In-Text ads, comScore, the leading digitial marketing research recently did a study finding that short of banner ads, users found Kontera In-Text ads the least intrusive ad types. And Kontera performed even better than that sounds when you consider “banner blindness”, where people become so over-saturated to banner ads they don’t notice them anymore, which while unobtrusive is also ineffective.

What makes Kontera so user friendly and effective is the fact that our ads are 100% user generated, meaning you won’t even see them unless you’re actively curious and scroll over the highlighted word. Plus, unlike some other companies, we only double underline the words we place ads on, so there’s almost never any confusion that it’s an ad. This approach leads to much happier end users, and much higher click through rates for you the publisher.

Least intrusive ad type? lol in your dreams. You are entitled to your own opinions not your own facts. Even Jacob Nielsen commented on intext ads:

One of misery design’s most insidious recent examples is the idea of embedding links to advertising on the actual words of an article using a service like IntelliTxt. By sullying the very concept of navigation, such ads not only damage the user experience on the host site, they poison the well for all websites. Such links make users even less likely to navigate sites, and more likely to turn to trusted search engines to guide them to the next page.

No matter how much you are trying to justify your business model, having popups coming out when a user simply move their mouse around the page to go to a side or header/footer or scroll down on the page is very annoying. It annoys the users and detracts the look of a page. Thankfully I wrote a little Javascript that nukes all these double line ads, I got it handy on my Firefox bar. As soon as a page loads and there are double underlines they get removed.

It is as annoying as banners that float and cover most of the screen forcing you to click their close button or pages that blast noise, music and or those “congratulations you won” flash ads. If you have to force your content/ads on people then you are doing it wrong. There are much better ways to provide advertising on a site…annoying your potential customers is a certain way to loose traffic.

Good thing that even Google blocks Kontera ads in the same pages where Adsense are posted. If you use Adsense on your page, Kontera ads will be blocked.